The Echo Maker

by Richard Powers

  She peeked at him, almost a question. She turned to Mark and pointed toward the bathroom. “You heard the doctor!”

  Mark squeezed himself up on his feet. He bobbed through the bathroom door, then popped right out again. “Oh! I think I might need some help.”

  Barbara shook her head. “Nice try, darling. Leave the towel on this time, okay?”

  “She called me darling! You heard her, right, Shrink? You’ll testify in court?”

  As the door closed again, Barbara turned to Weber. She held his gaze: again the unnerving connection. “Could you make a note that his sex drive seems unaffected?”

  Weber touched his earlobe. “Forgive me for asking the lamest question on earth. Have we run across each other before?”

  “You mean before a couple of days ago?”

  He failed to smile. He’d reached an age when everyone he met fit into one of the thirty-six available physiognomic templates. The number of people he met once and never saw again had reached devastating proportions. He’d crossed a threshold, around fifty, when every new person he met reminded him of someone else. The problem was exacerbated when total strangers greeted him familiarly. He could pass someone in the halls of the university medical center, then see them six months later at the Stop ’N Shop, overwhelmed by a sense of collegial connection. The virgin prairies of Nebraska were a dream, after the minefields of Long Island and Manhattan. Yet he’d had two days to locate this woman, and still came up empty-handed.

  Barbara tried not to smile. “I’d remember if we had.”

  So she did know who he was, maybe had even read him. What was a nursing-home attendant in her early forties doing reading books like his? The thought was inexcusably bigoted, especially for a man who’d once devoted a whole chapter to the category errors and prejudices that haunt the human circuitry. He studied her, compelled by her unlikelihood. “How long have you been with Dedham Glen?”

  She glanced skyward and made a comic calculation. “For a while, now.”

  “Where were you before?” Absurd, trying to hit the moon with a few scattered stones in the dark.

  “Oklahoma City.”

  Colder and colder. “Same line of work?”

  “Similar. I was at a large public facility down there.”

  “What brought you to Nebraska?”

  She smiled and dipped her head, like holding an apple under her chin. “I guess I just couldn’t take the hustle and bustle of the metropolis.” Something far away held her interest. Discovered, she turned shy. The look flustered him, although he’d asked for it. He looked away. Only the appearance of Mark Schluter in the bathroom doorway saved him. He was holding a towel in front of his naked body. The knit cap had disappeared, exposing the patchy, returning hair. Boyish, he beamed at his caregiver. “I’m ready for my pain now, ma’am.”

  With two arching eyebrows, Barbara excused herself, weirdly intimate, like the two of them had grown up three houses down from each other, gone to grade school together, written each other hundreds of letters, flirted one evening with testing more serious waters, then backed away, honorary blood relations for life.

  Weber gathered his papers and retreated to the lobby. He’d gotten what he’d come for, acquired the requisite data, seen up close one of the most bizarre aberrations the self could suffer. He had enough material now, if not for a write-up in the medical literature, at least for a haunting narrative case history. He could do little more, here. It was time to head home, resume the rounds of colloquium, classroom, laboratory, and writing desk, the routine that had provided his middle age with a degree of productive reflection wholly undeserved.

  But before he left, he’d just ask Barbara Gillespie about Mark’s changes over the last several weeks. He had Dr. Hayes’s observations, of course, and Karin’s. But only this woman saw Mark constantly, with no investment to sway her. He sat in the lobby on one end of a dark vinyl sofa across from a palsied woman slightly younger than he in an epic struggle with the zipper on her unnecessary jacket. He wanted to help, but knew enough not to. He felt oddly nervous, waiting for Barbara, as if he were eighteen again, at a graduation dance. He checked his watch every two minutes. At the fourth check, he sprang to his feet, startling the jacket woman, who, frightened, tore her zipper back down to the starting line. He’d forgotten having asked Karin Schluter to phone her brother at exactly three o’clock, now just minutes away.

  He hovered outside Mark’s closed door, shamelessly eavesdropping. He heard the woman talking, with laughing grunts from Mark. The phone rang. The boy cursed and called out, “I’m coming, I’m coming, already. Hold your damn horsemeat.”

  Over the sound of banged furniture, Barbara’s voice soothed. “Take your time. They’ll wait.”

  Weber knocked at the door and let himself in. A startled Barbara Gillespie looked up from where she had been flipping through magazines with her charge. Weber slipped into the room, closing the door behind him. Mark stood with his back turned, struggling with the phone. His arms shook as he shouted, “Hello? Who is this?” Then shocked silence. “Oh my God! Where are you? Where have you been?”

  Weber glanced at Gillespie. The attendant was staring at him, guessing not only the caller but Weber’s role. Her eyes questioned him. His turn to look away, guilty.

  Mark’s voice cracked and dampened, welcoming a loved one back from the dead. “You’re here? You’re in Kearney? Jesus. Thank God! Get over here, now. No! I am not listening to another word. I’m not talking to the phone, after all this. You won’t believe the shit I’ve been through. I can’t believe you weren’t around for this. I’m not…I’m just saying. Get over here. I need to look at you. I need to see. You know where I am? Oh, right, duh. Hurry your ass. Okay. No. Stop. I’m not talking. I’m hanging up now. You hear that?” He leaned down, demonstrating. “Hanging up.” He put the receiver on the hook. He lifted it up again, listening. He turned from the phone toward the others, glowing. He took Weber’s reappearance without comment. He was flying. “You are not going to believe who that was! Karin the S!”

  Barbara cast a glance at Weber and rose. “Lots to do,” she announced. She mussed Mark Schluter’s bare head and brushed past Weber.

  Weber brushed past the elated Mark and followed her out into the hallway. “Miss Gillespie,” he called, surprising even himself. “Would you have a minute?”

  She stopped and shook her head, waiting for him to come toward her, out of Mark’s earshot. “It’s not fair.”

  He nodded, too clinically. Her distress surprised him. Surely she dealt with worse, every day. “It’s a severe blow. But people are remarkably pliant. The brain will surprise us.”

  She raised her eyebrow. “I mean the call.”

  The accusation irritated him. She knew nothing of the literature, of differential diagnostics, of this man’s cognitive or emotional prospects. An hourly-wage staffer. He calmed himself. When the words came out, they were as level as the prairie horizon. “It’s something we needed to determine.”

  The word formed in her face: We? “I’m sorry. I’m just an aide. The nurses and therapists can tell you a lot more. Excuse me. I’m running way late.” She knocked and disappeared into another patient’s room, two doors down.

  Flustered, Weber returned to Mark’s. Mark was spinning on one heel. Seeing Weber, he pumped both hands in the air. “My damn sister! Can you believe it? She’ll be here in a minute. Man, she’s got a lot of explaining to do.”

  Weber hadn’t really expected the experiment to succeed. Experimental bias, Dr. Hayes would call it. Redundant: merely proposing an experiment betrayed an expectation. Yes, he suspected this thing was more than a simple short circuit. For a disconnection between the amygdala and the inferotemporal cortex to run roughshod over all higher cognition mocked any trust one put in consciousness. Whatever other reasons Weber’s reason had, some part of him hoped that a dramatic phone interaction might prove therapeutic. And maybe that was the greater cruelty, the wishful thinking that signed off on unapprove
d tests on live subjects.

  Mark stopped pacing when Karin Schluter appeared, triumphant, in the doorway. Something had changed: she’d done something to her hair—cut and waved it. Powder-blue eyeliner and apricot lips. A pair of stone-washed jeans and a too-snug T-shirt with a paw print across her breasts reading, Kearney High School, Home of the Bearcats. Cheerleader Karin, the one before Goth Karin. Weber had given her one awful sliver of hope, and she’d run with it. She swept into the room, arms out, her face radiant with relief, ready to hug them both. But as she closed the gap, Mark recoiled.

  “Don’t touch me! That was you on the phone? You haven’t tortured me enough? You had to pretend she was here? Where is she? What have you done with her?”

  A cry came from both siblings. Weber turned away as the noise traveled down the hall, caught up with Barbara Gillespie, and confirmed her. The experiment had gotten away from him. But the results were all his.

  That evening, with Sylvie, he recounted the day’s stories. How Mark and his friends played at racing, as if it meant nothing. How Karin had melted down, seeing them. How Mark had performed so strangely on the tests, and his explanations for every failure. How he’d soared at the sound of his sister, then shrieked at the sight of her. Weber didn’t mention the nurse’s aide half-accusing him on an ethics charge.

  For every story he gave Sylvie, she told him one back. But by the next morning, he felt as if he’d invented all of hers.

  Weber had worked with several patients who could not recognize their own body parts. Asomatognosia: it arose surprisingly often, almost always when strokes in the right hemisphere paralyzed a victim’s left side. He combined the subjects in print under the name Mary H. One sixty-year-old woman, the first of the Marys, claimed her ruined arm was “pestering” her.

  Pestering how?

  “Well, I don’t know whose it is. And I find that disturbing, Doctor.”

  Could it be yours?

  “Impossible, Doctor. Don’t you think I would know my own hand?”

  He made her trace the limb with her own right hand, all the way down from her shoulder. Everything connected. So whose hand is this, then?

  “It couldn’t be yours, could it, Doctor?”

  But it’s connected to you.

  “You’re a doctor. You know you can’t always believe what you see.”

  Other, subsequent Marys gave their limbs names. One elderly woman called hers “The Iron Lady.” A male ambulance driver in his fifties called his “Mr. Limp Chimp.” They ascribed personalities to their arms, whole histories. They talked, argued with, even tried to feed them. “Come on, Mr. Limp Chimp. You know you’re hungry.”

  They did everything but own them. One woman said her father left her his arm when he died. “I wish he hadn’t. It just falls on me. Falls on my chest, when I’m sleeping. Why did he want me to have this? It’s burdening me something awful.”

  A forty-eight-year-old auto mechanic told Weber that the paralyzed arm next to him in bed was his wife’s. “She’s in the hospital, now. She’s had a stroke. She’s lost control of her arm. So…here it is. I guess I’m taking care of it for her.”

  If that’s her arm, Weber asked, where’s yours?

  “Well, right here, of course!”

  Can you lift your arm?

  “I am lifting it, Doctor.”

  Can you clap your hands?

  The lone, good right hand flapped in the air.

  Are you clapping?

  “Yes.”

  I can’t hear anything, can you?

  “Well, it’s soft all right. But that’s because there’s not a whole lot to clap about.”

  Personal confabulation, the neurologist Feinberg called it. A story to link the shifting self back to the senseless facts. Reason was not impaired here; logic still worked on any other topic but this. Only the map of the body, the feel of it, had been fractured. And logic was not above redistributing its own indisputable parts in order to make a stubborn sense of wholeness true again. Lying in his rented room at 2:00 a.m., Weber could almost feel the fact in the limbs he lay numbering: a single, solid fiction always beat the truth of our scattering.

  He woke fitfully, from a dream where his work had gone terribly wrong. He was still hypnopompic. Elevated pulse and damp skin. A cold process throbbed just below his sternum. Something had happened in New York that he needed to fix. His dream had been on the verge of naming it. Something that marred everything he’d made in the last two decades. Some change in climate, the wind turning against him, exposing the obvious, all the evidence that he was the last to notice. And for a moment before full consciousness, he remembered feeling the same low-grade dread on previous nights.

  The spectral red glow of the clock said 4:10 a.m. Irregular meals and a strange environment, crashing blood sugar, sleep-doped prefrontal cortex, ancient physiological cycles linked to the earth’s spin: the same chemical flux behind any dark night of the soul. Weber closed his eyes again and tried to bring down his pulse, clear his mind of the night’s wild imaginings. He worked to locate himself and settle into the stream of his breathing, but he kept returning to a checklist of hazy indictments. It took until 4:30 a.m. to name what he was feeling: shame.

  He’d always slept effortlessly, on demand. Sylvie marveled at him. “You must have the conscience of a choirboy.” She herself would miss a night’s sleep if she showed up so much as five minutes late for a dentist’s appointment. His only bad stretch of insomnia had been in his first months of medical school, after they’d moved from Columbus to Cambridge. Years later, he’d had several rough nights after giving up clinical practice. Then, another restless week after Jessica told the two of them her long-held secret, a disclosure that distressed Weber not because he objected in the slightest but because Jess had needed to hide it from them for so long. His own fault: all the times he’d teased his daughter about boys, admiring her leisurely approach to the hunt, he was killing bits of her.

  He’d had stretches—the first year in his new Stony Brook lab; the sudden onset of his writing vocation—when he hadn’t needed sleep at all. He’d work past midnight, then rise after an hour or two with fresh ideas. And the same Sylvie who marveled that he could sleep within seconds of his head touching the pillow stood in awe of his ability to go night after night on almost nothing. “A camel, that’s what you are. A camel of consciousness.”

  She wouldn’t have recognized him now. He lay still and tried to empty himself. Resting is as good as sleep, his mother always claimed, half a century ago. Did researchers ever really disprove folk wisdom? But even resting lay beyond him. By five-thirty, the longest eighty minutes he’d lived through in years, he gave up. He dressed in the dark and went downstairs. The lobby was empty except for a young Hispanic woman behind the desk, who whispered good morning and said that coffee wouldn’t be ready for half an hour. Weber gave her a sheepish wave. She was reading a college textbook—organic chemistry.

  Dawn was starting to fuse. He made out shapes in the indigo light, but not yet colors. The street was lovely, cool, and dormant. He cut across the asphalt parkway toward the stunted commercial strip. A single light truck nosed around the Mobil station across the street. His ears adjusted, tuning in to complete cacophony. The dawn symphony: hoots and jeers, mocking whistles, chips, slides, arpeggios, and scales. At this hour, he stood little chance of being arrested for vagrancy. He stopped at the far end of the MotoRest parking lot, closed his filmy eyes, and listened.

  The songs came on, mathematical, melodious, their elaborate patterns slowly mutating. Some were as singable as any human tune. He counted, sensitizing to the calls that played off one another, each a solo against a mass chorus. He lost count after a dozen, unsure where to lump and where to split. Every complex riff was identifiable, although Weber could identify none. Softer, in the middle distance, he heard the shush of cars along Interstate 80 whooshing like sprung balloons.

  He opened his eyes: still in Kearney. A diffident commercial strip marked by a forest of
metal sequoias bearing harsh, cheery signage. The usual gamut of franchises—motel, gas, convenience store, and fast food—reassured the accidental pilgrim that he was somewhere just like anywhere. Progress would at last render every place terminally familiar. He wandered into the intersection and sniffed his way toward town.

  The arid chain stores along the strip gave way, in a handful of blocks, to gingerbread Victorians with wraparound porches. Just past these lay the core of an old downtown. The ghost of a prairie outpost, circa 1890, still looked out from the high, squared-off brick storefront façades. Light was rising. He could now read the posters in the shop windows: Celebrate Freedom Rally; Corvette Show; Faith In Bloom Garden Tour. He passed something called The Runza Hut, sealed up and dark, hiding its purpose from foreign interlopers.

  The town shook itself awake. Three or four people moved along the street across from him. He passed a monument to the local dead of the two world wars. The whole tableau left him uneasy. The streets were too wide, the houses and shops too ample, too much wasted lot between them. Kearney had been conceived on too grand a scale, back when they gave land away for free, back before the place’s real destiny became clear. Its lanes were laid out in a grid of numbered streets and avenues, as if it had been in danger of sprouting into a full-scale Manhattan against the epic emptiness enclosing it.

  Weber sat on a bench in front of the monument, searching through the last two days for what had so unsettled him. He considered Mark Schluter, the man’s uninterrupted, unthinking trust in his shattered self. But stopping and thinking about Mark proved a mistake. There on the too-spacious street, vertigo flooded back over Weber. Something crucial was escaping him. He had left himself vulnerable to some charge. The sidewalk widened and rolled under his feet. No rational explanation.

  He stood and walked two more blocks, looking for anything open at this hour. A greasy spoon materialized across the way. He pushed open the door, rattling a Jesus fish on the glass. He recoiled, even as a cowbell on the inside handle announced him. At a central table, four weathered men in denim and caps that sported hybrid seed logos turned to look at him. He shied into the room and hovered by the cash register until a woman called from the kitchen, “Seat yourself, hon.”